I believe very firmly that the truth is the only currency a writer has, and that if there is any hope of redeeming this book and making it meaningful it lies in the full story of my relationship with the cowboy and not just in the candy-coated version that appears in the book.

The first thing I think readers need to understand is just how much time it takes for a book to go from a writer’s computer files to a bookstore shelf. It takes more than a year, usually. That year is used for things like cover design, advance publicity for magazines, visits with book buyers from members of the sales team. So the version of my life that hit shelves last week is actually more than two years old.

That said, a lot can happen in two years, especially when you’re in a relationship with a man as complicated and volatile as the cowboy. There has been some confusion because in addition to the book I have also kept a sporadic blog about my ongoing relationship with the cowboy. Those who followed the blog understood that things changed, and they followed along with me. But for those reviewers who are new to the party, just learning about me from the memoir and then seeing on my blog that the relationship described in the book both wasn’t what it seemed, eventually, and is not in existence anymore, there is understandably a sense of having been the victim of a bait-and-switch operation. I am truly sorry for this, and I wish to reassure readers that no one in the world feels more the victim of bait and switch than I.

What I mean by this is that while I set out to write a memoir that was a love letter to a man I was deeply in love with, a man who challenged me in myriad ways, a man who changed my life profoundly, a man I respected and honored greatly at the time, what I actually wrote was a handbook for women on how to fall in love with a manipulative, controlling, abusive narcissist. The fascinating thing about the release of the book, for me, has been just how many reviewers have seen what I failed to see when I wrote the book: That the cowboy was controlling and abusive. I simply never saw it then. I admired and nearly worshipped the man. One reviewer described her disappointment in having learned that I was still with him at the end of the book, saying that she could not help but to think of cult members as she read my adoring account of a man who, to her eyes and through nothing but my journalistic descriptions of his interactions with me, was obviously a domineering abuser. It hurts to read reviews like that, but it is also empowering for me now. See, while I didn’t understand just what kind of man I’d fallen for at the start, and during the writing of the book, the longer we were together the more obvious it became.

If I’m the publisher, I’m wanting to kill myself right about now. Or kill my author. She’s just destroyed her own book. Oh, it gets better, or worse:

The book was true, when I wrote it. But life changed. I didn’t try to fool anyone, or to exploit anything. Rather, I believed in a man who didn’t deserve it. I fell for the incredible charm and manipulations such men are capable of. I failed to see what women who are wiser than I was are clearly seeing as they read my book — that this man was “a jerk,” as one reviewer said. I didn’t know. Worst of all, I wrote about my love and my flexibility and compromises in so glowing and beautiful a way as to secure a book deal from a wonderful publisher, an elite publisher, and now the same publisher is treating me like I have the plague, all because, I feel, I have saved my own life. I didn’t set out to deceive them. No one wanted the fairy tale more than I did! Ironically, being “punished” by the publisher feels a bit like the abusive emotional stonewalling the cowboy would do to me when I didn’t knuckle under and do what HE needed me to do for HIS needs…it’s familiar territory, only now it’s being done to me by a progressive woman in New York. I’m not a commodity. I’m not an object. I’m not a thing to be sold. I am a human being, a writer, an artist, a work in progress, and real life is messy sometimes, especially when it comes to love and abuse. I am deeply wounded by the stonewalling from my editor, as wounded as I ever was when the cowboy did it to me…

So now the editor is no better than a right-wing abusive cowboy? Oh boy. Please do not let Alisa Valdes and Elizabeth Wurtzel in the same room together. The crazy, it burns.

To be fair, what would you do if, between the time your book was finished and it was published, its whole raison d’etre collapsed? You’d pay the advance back, is one thing. Surely, though, the publisher must have grasped that this story, and the storyteller, were both extremely unstable. What is Valdes supposed to have done? If it’s true the editor and publisher stonewalled her, then that seems to have been a really bad idea. Boy, I can’t wait till the real story comes out. What a mess.

Valdes is right about the long lead time between turning in a manuscript and the book coming out. The MS for The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming locked sometime in September, but was essentially finished in August. The book won’t come out till early April — and it’s not because everyone at the publisher’s is sitting on their hands waiting. These things take time. What happened with The Feminist And the Cowboy is a nightmare for everybody — but it sounds like it ought not to have been a big surprise, given the characters involved.

Rod, she has deleted the blog entry in question. Must have heard from her publisher, the cowboy’s lawyers, or both.

I have the feeling that next year you’ll be writing about her writing about what a bastard the new soul mate is. (and if that dude has any sense, he’s putting on his running shoes right now. She’s already plastering his name and photo all over the Internet.)

Hmm…the blog post has been taken down. Also I’m listening to a live interview with her on Colorado radio right now, so far no mention of anything like what she’s been talking about in the post but we’re in a commercial break.

@Jennifer… “… it’s quite clear to me, that he is a narcissist. And until you’ve been married to one, or been involved with one it’s not fair, right, or just for you to judge her. ”

actually, we all have “the right” to judge others; and who said life is “fair”? if you were in fact married to a narcissist; you know they trade in “projection”. that is to say; perhaps SHE is the narcissist; and she presented “the cowboy” as a narcissist because of her own personality disorder. wouldn’t be the first time.

If she gave back the advance, then she’s serious about what she said about the guy in her blog. Stupid beyond belief, but serious.

If she didn’t, she’s simply setting up the PR for the next book.

I would also not be at all surprised to hear that she’s going on Oprah, Dr. Phil or some other, similar show to serve as a warning to others. (And to make a nice appearance fee that will do so much to ease her pain….)

Either way, I’ll bet next week’s gas money that her publisher is smiling and writing press releases and getting ready to buy Ms. Professional Narcissist a double round of her current drink of choice.

Rod, according to Valdez’s website, which you’ve already quoted from, she did tell her publisher early on about the problems developing in the relationship, and their attitude was to try to get her to hush it up, because they had a particular kind of marketing plan for the book they didn’t want to see messed up. Which was a pretty stupid line for the publisher to take, because I think it’s obvious that conflict sells books, and this should have been an opportunity to make the book into something more complex, and thus more interesting, and thus even more marketable.

This put Valdez in an ethical dilemma that forced her to choose between her relationship to her publisher, and her relationship to her readers. That’s a terrible position to be in, but I think she chose wisely, by siding with her readers in the end. A writer’s first obligation ought to be to tell readers the truth. Valdez already felt compromised by having to edit her own blog, and not tell the full story of the problems that were going on in the relationship during the two years between acceptance and publication of the book. When the book came out, she realized she had to say something honest about the outcome of the relationship. I think the real problem, if any here, is not in what she’s saying now, but in what she perhaps left out of the book, through her own selective editing, and more importantly, due to the demands of her publisher.

I’m glad you have such a wonderful relationship with your publisher, but you need to realize that this is rare. Many, many writers find themselves in terrible relationships with their publishers, who make all kinds of demands on writers to do things in books that they don’t want to do, because the publisher has final editorial control. In some cases, it leaves the author no moral choice except to speak out in public. Would you really have done differently if your book had been edited in such a manner as to create a false impression of your relationship to your sister?

Also, speaking the truth at the last minute doesn’t necessarily undermine the book’s sales. In fact, many have accused her of doing this deliberately to boost sales, and create controversy. I doubt that’s the case. She’s too much of a head case for that kind of calculated manipulation. But the publisher seems to have been really stupid in how it edited and promoted this book, in spite of knowing about the subsequent problems in the relationship. A smart publisher and editor would have jumped on that, and used it, rather than trying to suppress and hide it.

She appears to have fulfilled her contractual obligations to the publisher. The idea that an author should be grateful to any publisher just for being published, and roll over and be their lap puppy from then on, is a really juvenile notion of what an author’s role in the process actually is. The business of publishing can get ugly, and manipulative, and authors can be treated like dirt. That is all too common, actually. But authors have recourse to all sorts of things to assert their own viewpoint, even going public about the shortcomings of a book their publisher has insisted on putting out, when it ends up betraying the reality the author feels needs to be depicted.

I think you are also being uncharitable to Valdez for cultural reasons, and thus want to condemn her across the board, to create your own picture of this controversy, even if it isn’t entirely true. As I’ve said, she seems pretty daft to me, but not in speaking out about the truth of her relationship to this guy, which turned out diametrically the opposite of what the books purports it to be. Insisting that she be “grateful” to the publisher regardless of how they treated her, and what the booked turned out to be, sounds very much like the cowboy’s own narcissistic controlling efforts to make her conform to his needs, and his needs alone. So now I get where she’s coming from when she made that analogy. I’m just surprised that as a journalist you would condemn her for putting truth above that warped notion of “gratitude”.

Ms Valdes, oops, err, I mean “Church Lady” you seem to have VERY clear, almost clairvoyant insight into the psyche of yourself, oops I mean Ms. Valdes (i.e. “she felt that” and “this put her in a position of”). One so clever with words should do a better job when trying to mask your identity. Throwing in the occasional “daft” insult about yourself doesn’t make it any less obvious that it’s you, Ms. Valdes.

Drama queens like this mean what they say at the moment they say it. Five minutes later, they’re avowing something different. So the publisher probably expected something like the blog entry, and dealt with it when it happened, and the kerfuffle will probably boost book sales. No harm, no foul.

Let’s all pray for her son. Autism is difficult enough in a calm, structured environment. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be autistic and live with someone like Alissa Valdez.

I’ve been commenting on this blog for a very long time, and am a well-known regular. Ask anyone, including Rod. Your insinuation about my being Valdez is sheer bs, and a sign of your own disturbed, paranoid mentality. I said she “felt” this or that, because that’s what she wrote on her blog. No mind-reading necessary.

For this reason we need to construct social constructs to protect liberal women from conservative cowboys, and attempt to turn cowboys into men who recycle.

This is what the church is for. And what it’s been doing for 2000 years. Unlike liberal legal approaches, the church manages to do it (imperfectly, of course) in a way that is consistent with human nature.

I would suggest to everyone following this “story” to keep three things in mind….1. No matter how thin you pour a pancake, it always has two sides. 2. Ms. Valdes made her ‘name’ as a writer of fiction, and 3. If you do a little research on her, you’ll find that she has a loooong history of conflict, which might indicate that being involved with her is……’tumultuous’…..at best.